“I need to create a marketing campaign, right now. What do I do? Will Facebook save me? What do I need to?”

These are the types of questions that I have been faced with just recently from clients who clearly fit into the ‘small business model’. When they turn to the internet for help or scan the works of international coaches, they tend to find responses suitable for multinationals. So, what is a suitable answer for them.

Here are two simple guidelines, based on case studies with my customers.

First, consider the works of Hinge, a company who clients feature in the Fortune 500, but who has developed a practical marketing planning guide, which can be adopted by the corner shop in a small village.

Beyond the buzz words, Hinge forces the reader to consider 3 basic questions:

• What is your message – a.k.a., what are you really selling? Can you describe this in two lines so that it fits in to a bottle?
• Where should your growth come from?
• Are you aware of the differences of online and offline marketing campaigns, and how they need to be integrated?

These questions need some very careful thought and discussion. You cannot just launch into a campaign without establishing your own fundamentals about who you are. I strongly encourage my customers to consider what is their value proposition for their own potential customer. And that statement applies to a one-person service provider, a non-profit, start-up or otherwise.

Now let me take this one stage further and more on to my second point. Increasingly, people are turning to Facebook for an immediate and cheap solution. It is the in-thing to do, no? In the past two weeks alone, at least three of my own clients have asked me to find them Facebook marketing experts.

Fair enough. However, the above rule about value proposition definition still applies. The external expert cannot create this for you. And in addition, as sales campaigns via Facebook is still a relatively new industry compared to traditional advertising, by definition these so-called experts tend to lack experience.

Here is an example of what I mean. Yesterday, I was meeting with a client in Jerusalem, when we held a conference call with a somebody involved in social media. He could point to previous clients who had given him testimonials about the number of clicks he had achieved for them. Great. Very genuine.

However, these assignments had been in the non-profit sector or politicians.Mar My client is a business, seeking to sell a product. They are not just looking for ‘likes”. They want money to be transferred to their bank account. This demands a significant and additional set of thought processes. Could Mr. Expert provide such a service?

Marketing campaigns are sophisticated creatures. Their content is driven by understanding the key fundamentals of your business, regardless of its size or type of organization. It is the task of the business owner to identify those characteristics, before sums are laid out at the implementation stage.